Anita’s mother Jyotsna had lodged a complaint with Behrampore PS that her daughter had been missing since October 14. On October 15, she came to know that son Sairul had “kidnapped and married” her minor daughter.

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Wonder whether it would have come so easily had it not been for the assertive Hindu groups protesting and retaliating. The least that such protests have done is to develop a public awareness on ‘fraudulent conversion’.

New Delhi, Dec. 28: The Indian Church has asked all Christian groups to guard against aggressive evangelism or denigration of other religions in an effort to become “more sensitive” towards local cultures.

The decision came at this month’s meeting of the Christian United Forum, which includes Baptists, Catholics, Lutherans, Seventh-day Adventists and Pentecostal groups among its members.

The resolution adopted at the meeting also asks the clergy and lay people to follow a simple lifestyle and try to be as environment-friendly as possible.

Aggressive evangelism by certain Christian groups has been earning the Church bad publicity by creating a perception that Christians are out to degrade and defame other religions, the resolution says. The “impression” that Christian groups are receiving money for every act of conversion does not help either, it adds.

The meeting, however, denied that Christians received money for conversions, or that they carried out “forcible conversions” — as alleged by the Sangh parivar, which wants a ban on conversions.

The conference has appealed to all Christian denominations to refrain, especially during preaching, from badmouthing other religious communities, their deities or the traditions they hold sacred since this violates Christ’s teaching of love, harmony and peace.

The resolution says the beauty of Christianity is tarnished when Christians denigrate others. “We have to work positively to build a harmonious relationship with people of all religions and cultures,’’ it says.

The Church leaders took the view that aggressive evangelism and attempts to denigrate other religions were partly responsible for the September 2008 communal riots in Karnataka. The National Commission for Minorities had given a similar report after the violence.

The Christian groups have also decided to set up a committee to formulate measures to end interdenominational conversions — known as “sheep stealing” — and strengthen Christian unity. They have stressed the need to have more co-ordination and dialogues among themselves.

The Church has also decided on a code of conduct for priests and seminary students, encouraging them to lead simple and austere lives. “It is time for introspection,” the resolution says.

Under the code, priests and seminarians are not expected to use expensive consumer goods but to eat and dress simply. The code asks the priests to turn down offers of luxuries.

While travelling, they should not choose high-end facilities but travel with the common people.

“The Church wants to curb lavishness of all kinds and set a model of austere and simple life,’’ said Fr Paul Thelakkat of the Catholic Bishops Council of India.

Priests have been asked to create a platform in every parish for interaction with lay people.

The laity should be educated on the importance of the environment and encouraged to turn parishes “as green as possible’’ and use solar power whenever possible.

Bangalore, Nov 18 (IANS) A church in north Karnataka has been vandalized and a cross, doors and windows have been damaged, police and church authorities said Wednesday.

Vasanthkumar, the priest at the church in Humnabad in Bidar district, about 700 km from here, told reporters that the attack must have taken place late Tuesday and the damage was noticed Wednesday. “It looks like a deliberate act of desecration as nothing has been stolen,” Vasanthkumar said. He said the cross on top the church, the main door and windows have been damaged. The police visited the church and registered a case on the complaint lodged by the priest.

In September last, more than 15 churches were vandalized in different parts of the state by pro-Hindu activists, protesting alleged conversion activity by missionaries.

The last line delivers the punch. It has to be Hindu activists by default …..

Within a month, Karnataka Police solve the case.

Oops! no Hindu Activist, but the Pastor Vasanthkumar himself arranged it ………..

BIDAR: The Bidar district police Thursday claimed to have solved the case of an attack on a church in Humnabad town in Bidar district on November 17 with the arrest of a former pastor of the church and three hired goons who allegedly attacked the church.

Superintendent of Police Satish Kumar in a press statement said here that the main accused, Vasant, who was the pastor of the Humnabad church till June this year before his transfer to a church at Basantpur in Chincholi taluk in Gulbarga district had conspired to damage the church with the hope that the church authorities would cancel his transfer and keep him in Humnabad.

Mr. Kumar said the investigation revealed that the accused had taken the help of B. Sunil, S. Mallikarjun Swamy and S. Manjunath, all belonging to Humnabad town, to damage the church with a promise of paying them Rs. 10,000. According to Mr. Kumar, the main accused had already paid Rs. 1,000 as advance to the trio for carrying out the attack.

The attack, which had embarrassed the district administration and the police, had caused quite a stir among the Christians who wanted the Government to take immediate action against those responsible for the attack. Furniture, electrical fittings in the main prayer hall and the cross on the dome of the church were damaged. The Opposition parties such as the Congress and the Janata Dal (Secular) had also joined the Christians in demanding action against those responsible for the attack.

Mr. Kumar said that a special team of police officers, headed by Additional Superintendent of Police Thyagarajan and Circle Inspectors M.H. Satish, working in Humnabad police station and James Menenzis working in Raichur, was formed to solve the case. The team questioned several persons and finally the pastor. The accused revealed the names of the three people he had hired to attack the church.

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If you mention Love Jihad or write about Honor killing, it will hurt Muslim feelings.If you say Islamic terror or mention Muslim terrorist, it will make the Muslims angry.For Islam is peaceful.If a Muslim is asked questions, it is racial profiling.If a Muslim dies form any cause, cry Muslim victimhood.If they protest and kill others it is their religious rights.If Muslims damage property or burn buses, they are unidentified mob.If Muslims kill to enforce their religion, they are misguided youths.For Islam does not preach violence.Don’t say Ram temple in Ayodhya was demolished by Babar. It will disrupt communal harmony.Don’t even think of investigating Taj Mahal. It will incite communal tension.Instead it is much safer to dump the Hindus, kill their dreams, choke their voice, deny their rights, damn their religion, crush their protests, evade their demands.Let their families die and their properties be destroyed.And best if you have a secular Hindu to endorse it. Jai Hind? Or is it HAI Hind?

VR Jayaraj | Kochi

Within ten days of the Kerala High Court’s observations that a campus-based Islamist campaign called Love Jihad or Romeo Jihad for converting non-Muslim girls into Islam through love did exist in Kerala, another judge of the same court put forward a different argument and imposed a freeze on investigations into two such cases.

Considering a petition filed by Shehenshah and Sirajuddin, students of a Pathanamthitta college praying for cancellation of the FIRs against them, Justice Sasidharan Nambiar stayed the investigations against them till further orders. The Muslim youths had been accused of forcing their lovers, one Hindu and the other Christian, to convert into Islam forcibly.

The judge observed that the probes had targeted a particular community and such a tendency would lead to communal tension. He asked the police to submit detailed affidavit on the matter. Justice Nambiar also froze the follow-up actions in these two cases.

On December 9, Justice KT Sankaran of the High Court had observed that there were sufficient reasons to believe that an organized conversion campaign was operating in the State. He had also asked the Government to consider formulation of a law against forced conversion on the lines of the ones in force in certain other states. He had also rejected the bail applications submitted by Shehenshah and Sirajuddin.

On the contrary, Justice Nambiar said that inter-community marriages could not be treated as instances of forced conversion. He said that inter-caste and inter-community marriages had been happening in the society for a long time and these could not be seen as illegal. He said those who had probed the cases seemed to be harbouring certain vested interests.

The court unleashed scathing criticisms against the police for their assumptions on the cases, the case diary of which had come to its possession last week. The judge said that the descriptions found in the case diary had shocked his conscience. He added that the case seemed to be falsely framed by the police.

Legal experts pointed out that Justice Nambiar’s order and observations were in total contrast with those of Justice Sankaran. Ruling that Love Jihad seemed to be real, the latter had told the State Government that it had the responsibility to check forced conversions. Justice Sankaran had also rejected a petition seeking a ban on the use of the terms Love Jihad and Romeo Jihad.

Justice Sankaran had pointed out that the police reports had made it clear that forced conversions through love affairs as a movement had been going on in Kerala since 1996. He saidthat according to police reports, about 4,000 conversions had taken place through love affairs in the past four years, and 2,800 girls of other religions had been converted into Islam in this period.

He also said that1,600 such conversions had taken place in four northern districts including Malappuram, Kerala’s Muslim-majority district. It was evident from the report submitted by the DGP that outfits like Islamist Popular Front of India (earlier NDF) and its student wing, the Campus Front, were behind the organized campus-based conversion programme , said Justice Sankaran.

The issue came out in the open in August last, when the parents of Hindu girl Mithula and her Christian friend Bino, both MBA students, approached the High Court with habeas corpus petitions seeking presentation of heir missing daughters. The girls first said they had converted voluntarily but later admitted that they had been forced to convert in a house at Chelari in Malabar.

Neither was it based on whose picture or news items were flashed for the most time on Indian news media, of which he could have been a indisputable winner thanks to the loyal and sycophantic media, lead by Padmashree Sara-desh-hai-hai himself.

The criteria was that no one toured India the way he had done.

One has to admit that his competitors were all relatively static – perhaps stuck with work only in their respective constituency, assembly, parliament or state – at least we are least conscious of when and where they go.

Surely, Rahul Gandhi has come a lot up in the political ladder in India from the days of his FBI encounter in Boston with his Columbian girlfriend and $200,000 in cash, to be given this honorable accolade.

Only President Obama’s anticipatory Nobel peace prize (chosen within two weeks of Presidency) can be a comparison for this.

Just like in the Batla house encounter case, CBI has given clean chit to the cops who however have been already accused, humiliated and jailed for reasons that seems nothing more than ‘public demand’.

Earlier the media, journalist and even the state governmentwere implicated in spreading falsehood, fabricating evidence, inciting street violence. Media was accused of inciting communal hatred by reporting, based on the accounts of individuals claiming to be eyewitnesses, that one victim’s forehead had been smeared with sindoor — an allegation that suggested that the rapists were Hindus.

Again the question is how can this nexus of media-journalist-politicians-minority appeasers be broken.

And how does one expect the security forces-police-military to continue working thanklessly in this hostile atmosphere, risking their life and reputation?

Accountability is virtually nonexistent and will remain so until exemplary punishments are implemented to those responsible.

Giving a clean chit to four police officials in the mysterious Shopian case, the CBI today said two women who were alleged to have been raped and murdered had actually died due to drowning, and has indicted 14 people including doctors and lawyers for allegedly fabricating evidence.

Seeking to give a quietus to the case that had led to widespread protests for 47 days in the valley during summer, CBI counsel Anil Bhan informed a division bench headed by Chief Justice Bahrin Ghosh that the women had died due to drowning in a stream.

“Rape and murder have not been established, and a report has been filed before the notified court of the CBI, that is the chief judicial magistrate of Srinagar,” Bhan said.

Life in Shopian town, 51 km from here, had come to a standstill after the bodies of 22-year-old Neelofar and 17-year-old Asiya were found in a stream. Protests were held claiming that the two had been allegedly raped and murdered.

The CBI, which has based its finding on the opinion received from experts of AIIMS, Central Forensic and Scientific Laboratory and FSL of Haryana, had told the CJM’s court on December 10 that the women were never raped and had died due to drowning.

In an embarrassment for the State government and the one-man Jan Commission appointed by it, CBI found nothing against the four policemen – superintendent of police Javed Iqbal Mattoo, deputy SP Rohit Basgotra, station house officer Shafiq Ahmed and sub-inspector Gazi Karim.

Thefour had spent two months in jail following orders from the high court, which had said it was convinced with the findings of the Special Investigating Team constituted by it to probe the incident that they allegedly tried to destroy the evidence.

The CBI alleged that the doctors did not carry out the postmortem properly, and gave a false report that the two victims had been raped before being murdered. The medicos were also charged for preparing false vaginal slides.

Ironically, five lawyers, including the former and present as well as the public prosecutor Mushtaq Ahmed Gattoo and Sheikh Mubarak respectively for allegedly conspiring and intimidating witnesses to make false submissions before a magistarte about women cries being heard from a policevan.

Besides these two lawyers, others include Abdul Majid Dar, Mohammed Yusuf Bhat and Altaf Ahmed. They all have been charged with section 194, 342 (wrongful confinement) and 120-B (criminal conspiracy).

The five lawyers have been charged with entering into a criminal conspiracy with Ali Mohammed Sheikh and Zahoor Ahmed Ahnger in pressuring two – Abdul Rashid and GM Lone – in giving false statement under oath before a magistrate that they had heard women cries coming from a police vehicle.

The CBI questioned Rashid and Lone who spilt the beans and told the agency sleuths that they had been pressurised by the lawyers through Sheikh and Ahnger. The CBI got their fresh confessional statement registered before a chief judicial magistrate.

A police constable Mohammed Yaseen Ganai has also been charge sheeted for allegedly giving false information and false charges made with an intent to injure.

The CBI took over the investigation into the case on September 17 and a team headed by deputy inspector general Satish Golcha has been camping here since then. The agency’s special director SC Sinha had also visited the place to take stock of the situation.

Ahead of the CBI investigations, the state government had appointed one-man commission headed by Justice (retd) Muzzafar Jan who, among other things, had recommended a detailed questioning of the relatives of the victims including Neelofar’s husband Shakeel and her brother Zirar Shah.

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On 16th January 2005, the Times of India was too happy to publish a report, What’s next after Saraswati for ASI?, with a conclusive statement, “So we finally know that the mythical river Saraswati doesn’t exist. After nine excavations in different parts of India, excited initial whispers of its hazy trace, and seven months into the new UPA regime, we were told, via the Rajya Sabha, that there’s no sign of Saraswati.”.

Unfortunately it has become a fight between them and us. The ‘them” is represented by the pseudo-secularists and communists along with people from the likes of the Times of India and the UPA, to whom the Vedic and Hindu glories are mythical. The “us” is always on their backfoot, fighting for the mere acknowledgement of the faith and its wisdom, occasionally finding their voices in the Pioneers.

Earlier, had refused to agree despite Govt agencies confirming existence of river

In a significant shift from its earlier stand that probes conducted so far showed no trace of the mythical river, the Union Government has recently admitted that scientists have discovered water channels indicating “beyond doubt” the existence of the “Vedic Saraswati.”

The Government’s fresh submission came in response to an unstarred question in Rajya Sabha on December 3 by Prakash Javadekar (BJP), who wanted to know whether satellite images had “established the underground track of Saraswati, and if so, why should the precious water resources not be exploited to meet growing demands.”

To this, the Union Water Resources Ministry quoted in writing the conclusion of a study jointly conducted by scientists of ISRO, Jodhpur and the Rajasthan Government’s Ground Water Department, published in the Journal of Indian Society of Remote Sensing. Besides other things, the authors had said that “clear signals of palaeo-channels on the satellite imagery in the form of a strong and powerful continuous drainage system in the North-West region and occurrence of archaeological sites of pre-Harappan, Harappan and post-Harappan ages beyond doubt indicate the existence of a mighty palaeo-drainage system of the Vedic Saraswati river in this region… The description and magnanimity of these channels also matches with the river Saraswati described in the Vedic literature.”

A leading educationist and currently chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University, Yash Pal, who had published in 1980 in his own words “a small paper on the existence of Saraswati river which attracted attention,” concurred with the view. “Surveys so far have brought out clearly the path the river had taken when in flow,”the national research professor told The Pioneer. He did a stint with ISRO (which has played a pivotal role in the probes so far) from 1973-1980 where he set up the Space Application Centre.

On whether the Union Government should assume a proactive role on the issue of reviving the river to tackle the water shortages, he said, “With advancement of technology more research should be conducted. The river was not lost yesterday; perhaps due to tectonic shifts it disappeared ten thousand years ago. We have to keep these issues in mind.”

All through its tenure until now, the UPA Government had denied the existence of the mystery river. Then Culture Minister Jaipal Reddy had told Parliament that excavations conducted so far at nine sites had not revealed any trace of the lost river Saraswati. He stated that the UPA Government had not extended the sanction for the project given by the NDA Government.Giving a progress report of the Saraswati River Heritage Project launched by the NDA Government, he had said that though the project report was prepared in September 2003 envisaging a cost of Rs 36.02 crore, it was later slashed to Rs 4.98 crore.

The Leftists, who commanded great influence over the first five years of the UPA regime, too, were dismissive of the evidences. Senior leaders even castigated probe agencies for ‘wasting’ time and money over the study of the mystery river. Three years ago, senior CPI(M) leader and Politburo member Sitaram Yechury slammed the ASI for its efforts. A Parliamentary Standing Committee on Transport, Tourism and Culture, which he headed in 2006, said, “The ASI has deviated in its working and has failed in spearheading a scientific discipline of archaeology. A scientific institution like the ASI did not proceed correctly in this matter.”

These assertions had come despite mounting evidence of the river collected by central agencies such as Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), Geological Survey of India (GSI), Oil and Natural Gas Commission (ONGC), Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) and the Central Groundwater Authority (under the Water Resources Ministry). The Government had also failed to acknowledge expert opinion that the river’s revival could tackle the increasing water demands of more than 20 crore people in the North-West region of the country.

The first national impetus for research on Saraswati came during the NDA regime when the then Union Culture Minister Jagmohan in June 2002 announced excavations to trace the river’s course. He named a team of four experts – Baldeo Sahai of ISRO, Ahmedabad, archaeologist S Kalyan Raman, glaciologist Y K Puri and water consultant Madhav Chitle – for the task. But even earlier, States like Haryana had begun their study of the ‘underground river.’

Talking of the progress, SL Aggarwal, an official in Haryana Irrigation Department said, “Work on the 3.5 km stretch of river Saraswati between Jyotisar and Bibipur would be completed in one-and-a-half months and then we would be able to revive the ancient river and be able to use the water for irrigation purposes.” The Haryana Government recently sanctioned Rs 10.05 crore for the project of revival of the river, with the Oil and Natural Gas Commission carrying out geophysical and geoelectric surveys for drilling of wells in association with Kurukshetra University for exploratory purposes.

A non-government organisation (NGO), Saraswati Nadi Sodh Sansthan, has also been working for the revival of the ancient river through its entire track. Two seminars were held on this issue on October 22, 2008 and November 21, 2009 at Kurukshetra where representatives from ONGC, Geological Survey of India and Indian Space Research Organisation were invited.

Rajasthan too has been an active participant in the project. Some four decades ago the Archeological Survey of India (GSI) had conducted excavations at a village named Kalibanga in Srigananagar district of Rajasthan, unearthing a full- fledged township beneath a mound, locally called ‘Thed.’ The ASI researchers came to the conclusion that the sight belonged to the Harappan period. Subsequent studies revealed that this flourishing town was situated on the banks of the Saraswati which once flowed from this part of the Rajasthan desert.

About two decades ago, scientists at Central Arid Zone Research Institute (CAZRI) at Jodhpur launched a project to track down the traces. They concluded that the ancient channels were a dead river that could well be Saraswati. Interestingly, here, the ancient texts and the geographical history of the region were constant bases of reference of the studies.

Analyses of images earlier taken by the American satellite Landsat in the 1970’s clearly showed the presence of underground water in a definitive pattern in the Jaisalmer region. As part of the project, then, underground water researchers were asked to dig bore wells at places from where this lost river used to flow. They selected Chandan Lathi near Jaisalmer for this purpose. To the surprise of researchers, the water found after digging the bore wells at places on the course of the river was not only sweet but available in plenty. Encouraged by this discovery, they dug two dozen bore well in the area, from where the river used to flow, and in all of them they found sweet water.

A few years later Dr Vakankar, a noted historian, as part his Itihas Sanklan Yojna, visited this and other sites linked with the river. Together with another expert Moropant Pingle, he concluded that the Saraswati used to flow from this part of Rajasthan, Sirsa in Haryana, Bhatinda in Punjab and Srigangangar district in Rajasthan.

With the Government indicating a shift in its position, it remains to be seen whether the research work by central agencies that had come to a near halt, will now resume.

— With inputs from Lokpal Sethi in Jaipur and Nishu Mahajan in Chandigarh